‘Release the footage’: Mississippi protest over police killing of one-year-old

About 100 people gathered on Friday morning outside of the Walmart in rural Senatobia, Mississippi , to protest about the killing of a one-year-old boy by police earlier this month. Walmart itself was closed, its doors barricaded. During a protest at the Walmart earlier in the week, officers deployed teargas on those gathered to force the crowds to disperse. On 14 June, a Senatobia police officer shot into the passenger side of a vehicle in which Kohen Kartier Wiley, a one-year-old boy, sat on his mother’s lap. The officer’s bullet killed Kohen and injured the woman who was driving the vehicle. “ I watched my baby take his first breath, and I watched my baby take his last breath,” Vellesiya Wiley, Kohen’s mother, said during a press conference on Monday. The Mississippi department of public safety (DPS) has said that officers were responding to a call alleging the theft of diapers, but no shoplifting charges have been filed. Wiley said that the driver of the vehicle paid for the diapers at the store’s self-checkout. A 14 June statement from the DPS said that “officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one.” Wiley and some witnesses have disputed the police account, and taken umbrage with officials referring to Kohen, an infant, as a “juvenile”. …